Hard Times

by Studs Terkel

  Finally, in ’36, in the middle of the year, I quit. I never went back to him again.

  Was he trying to persuade you to stick with him?

  Yes. He was a proud man, and it was very difficult for him to make the request, yet I couldn’t do it. I didn’t like the direction in which he was going. He was turning into a demagogue. He was out-Huey Longing Huey Long. He was afraid of Huey.

  Huey was a good friend of mine. He was threatening to run for President in 1936. The poll showed that Huey would take ten percent of the vote. I’m sure Farley could confirm this. He would have cut into the Democratic vote all over the country. Roosevelt, in order to counteract that, moved toward the Long program. His tax program in ’36 was pure Huey: soak the rich. Roosevelt was using the same demagogic tactics. It’s possible Huey Long—if he weren’t killed—would have busted open the Democratic Party even then. As George Wallace is doing now.

  Of course, Huey had a much finer brain than Wallace. Only he abused his power. He was arrogant and he drank too much. You’d go to see Huey after three o’clock in the afternoon, and he didn’t make much sense. He made sense in the morning. He had a rather contemptuous attitude toward Roosevelt. He didn’t think Roosevelt was very smart.

  I used to go up and see Huey in his apartment at the Mayflower. I said, “Huey, you have a great capacity. Watch out for the people around you.” He said, “I haven’t got any money. This is the way I live. I live simple.” I don’t think he enriched himself. But he did have a lot of thieves around him.

  He spent himself. He tore his passion to tatters, as Shakespeare would put it. He didn’t need to do that. He had too much brains to get violent. But that was his way of dealing with the people down South. One of the things he destroyed was himself. He didn’t need to go swaggering around. He was much too good for that. It was one of the great tragedies.

  I think Roosevelt was a product of his time, his environment, that sort of thing. He had all that with him. Huey didn’t. He came from a poor family, sought power and got it. Roosevelt hated him because he was so different. It was the aristocrat distrusting this farm boy.

  POSTSCRIPT: “Huey Long came up to my office, one hot day in August, ‘33. He said: 7 want you to get a dean for my law school.’ I had been teaching Public Law at Columbia. He said: ‘I’ll pay anything you say. I got a damn good medical school. I want a good law school.’ I said: 7 suppose the dean at Harvard gets $15,000.’ ‘Well, that’s nothing.’ I thought for a while. I had a student two years before at Columbia. His name was Wayne Morse. He was Dean of the Law School at the University of Oregon. ‘Call him up,’ says Huey. Huey talked to him and said, ‘How much you getting? I’ll double your salary.’

  “Wayne sent me a telegram: ‘What is this all about? Is the Senator able to appoint a law school dean?’ I sent back a telegram: ‘If he offered you the job, you can have it.’ So he went to the President of the University of Oregon, who doubled his salary. Now what would have happened had Wayne Morse gone to Louisiana?”

  C. B. (Beanie) Baldwin

  He came to Washington from Virginia in 1933, as an assistant to the Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace. He served in the Administration until the death of Roosevelt in 1945

  “When he first met me, Wallace said, ‘We’ve been lookin’ for someone with a southern accent in this office.’ ” (Laughs.)

  THE NEW DEAL was an uneasy coalition. Fights developed very early between the two factions: one, representing the big farmers, and the other, the little farmers. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration came into being shortly after I got to Washington. Its purpose was to increase farm prices, which were pitifully low. All the farmers were in trouble, even the big ones. There was a proposal that it be set up independent of the Department. Wallace and Tugwell 101 were able to thwart that.

  You might say there were three interests involved. There was the consumer thing, too. Rex brought Jerome Frank in as General Counsel for the Triple-A. To protect them. George Peek, the head of the agency—he resented bein’ under Wallace—was only interested in high farm prices. They would never admit it, but George represented the big farmers. And there was the need to protect the sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the South.

  Tobacco got down to four cents a pound. Nobody could produce it for that. The Triple-A people reached an agreement with the industry: to more than double the price of tobacco overnight. They wanted no restrictions on the price of cigarettes and smoking tobacco. The net profits would have been greater than the total price paid the small farmers and the labor cost in the manufacture of cigarettes and smoking tobacco, all put together. Naturally, our consumers’ group and Jerome Frank raised hell. Wallace decided to turn it down.

  Peek, who wanted to see the agreement ratified, went to Roosevelt, undercutting Wallace. The President called the Secretary, I happened to be on the phone: “Henry, I’m sorry we’ve got to make some compromises. I want you to approve this.” They argued a little. Finally, Wallace said, “Mr. President, this is your decision.” I brought the papers for Wallace to sign. We met in the lobby of the Mayflower. He said, “Beanie, this is the most appropriate place in the country to sign this damned agreement.” 102 (Laughs.)

  Wallace was actually opposed to crop restriction. Very few people know this. But we had a problem. Hog prices had just gone to hell. What were they—four, five cents a pound? The farmers were starving to death. They were at the mercy of the packers. We tried to reach an agreement, similar to the tobacco deal—which, despite everything, had worked out fairly well.

  They decided to slaughter piggy sows. You know what a piggy sow is? A pregnant pig. They decided to pay the farmers to kill them and the little pigs. Lot of ’em went into fertilizer. This is one of the horrible contradictions we’re still seeing.

  They lowered the supply goin’ to market and the prices immediately went up. Then a great cry went up from the press, particularly the Chicago Tribune, about Henry Wallace slaughtering these little pigs. You’d think they were precious babies. The situation was such, you had to take emergency measures. Wallace never liked it.

  You had a similar situation on cotton. Prices were down to four cents a pound and the cost of producing was probably ten. So a program was initiated to plow up cotton. A third of the crop, if I remember. Cotton prices went up to ten cents, maybe eleven.

  This brought on other complications. The Farm Bureau was pressing for these benefit payments to be made to the land owners. We were fighting for these payments to be made directly to the sharecroppers and the tenant farmers, rather than flowing down through the land owners. In most cases, they’d get very little money.

  People like Norman Thomas moved in, highly critical of the Department, and properly, I think. Paul Appleby 103 and I had meetings with him, told him what we were trying to do. He didn’t spare us, either, and I don’t blame him. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union picketed the Department of Agriculture. As I look back on it, a very poor job was done in protecting the sharecroppers and the tenant farmers. The bureaucratic process, even in a decent administration, defeats you. And where there’s an uneasy coalition of opposing forces….

  “Roosevelt committed himself in the campaign of ’32 to cutting government expenditures. It was the most conservative speech he ever made. So we got started with our hands tied behind our back. A lot of things New Dealers wanted couldn’t be done without increasing expenditures.

  “He had to shift his position. So he brought Harry Hopkins in. Unemployment had jumped to about sixteen million. Something had to be done. He got a substantial appropriation in ’34 for relief and also for public works. The public works thing went to Ickes—the very careful, methodical guy who was gonna be sure that nobody took advantage of the building monies.

  “Hopkins persuaded the President that the situation was so desperate that everybody in the country who wanted a job had to have a job. Even with very low pay. Almost overnight, he set up the Civil Works Administration.

  “Harry was reall
y a sloppy administrator. Ickes was a very careful guy. Hopkins was impatient and he knew you had to have something to eat on. He was the kind of guy that seldom wrote a letter. He’d just call and say, ‘Send a million dollars to Arkansas and five million to New York. People are in need.’

  “They set up this CWA very hurriedly. There was no means test. Any guy could just walk into the county office—they were set up all over the country—and get a job. Leaf raking, cleaning up libraries, painting the town hall … Within a period of sixty days, four million people were put to work.

  “There was no real scandal in this thing, but it lent itself to all the reactionary criticisms that it couldn’t be well-managed. With our mores, you just can’t dump $20,000 into a county in the Ozarks and say: put people to work. That’s contrary to everything our political establishment was brought up to believe.104 This lasted only six months. Roosevelt and Hopkins had to end it. They weren’t able to get Congressional support to continue.

  “Roosevelt won another appropriation—three billion—through an omnibus bill. This brought on another ruckus. Ickes thought it should go for public works: Grand Coulee Dam, Bonneville, projects of this type. They’re slow to get under way—wonderful, but they take time. Hopkins thought people should be put to work immediately, even though it might not be done very efficiently.”

  Among the agencies created was the Resettlement Administration. It was independent of the Department of Agriculture, with Rex Tugwell as head, reporting directly to the President. This was a unique agency and, for that time, fantastic. It was Rex who largely drafted the Executive Order. It had to do with the plight of the small farmer and the migrant worker.

  “I was in it from the beginning. Rex brought me in to run the administrative end of it. When he’d delegate authority to someone he trusted, he’d back ‘em to the hilt. There were all sorts of bureaucratic battles, but Rex would have nothing to do with ’em. He gave me just absolutely marvelous backing.”

  Harry Hopkins had established the Rural Rehabilitation Division. It had something to do with urban unemployment. One of the answers was sending people back to the farm, even though they had no farm experience. Tugwell objected and he was absolutely right. Farming requires a good deal of skill. These people just would have been lost.

  Hopkins recognized it as a mistake fairly early—that this thing ought to be more closely tied to agriculture. So he agreed to transfer the operation to the Resettlement Administration.

  “With a paltry $5 million appropriation, the Subsistence Homestead Division was established. A lot of Utopians dreamed of this for years: setting up rural industrial communities. This was given to Ickes originally, but he never had much empathy for Utopians. (Laughs.) All sorts of the craziest ideas came out on how to spend this money. Ickes was glad to get rid of this, so he transferred it to us. Generally, Ickes liked to handle everything, but this was one he wanted out of.” (Laughs.)

  He describes a project in Hightstown (now called Roosevelt), New Jersey. A group of Jewish ladies’ garment workers moved from New York City to this rural community. “The enthusiasm was terrific.” It was a cooperative, some working on the farm, others in the garment plant. “They had a hell of a good first year, but you take people out of a highly competitive situation and try to set up a Utopian society, you’re gonna have some difficulty. (Laughs.)

  “Mrs. Roosevelt tried to get Dubinsky interested,105 but he didn’t like this co-op nonsense. The garment industry was against it, too. They called it a Socialistic, Communist project. Anyway, it failed.”

  The Rural Rehabilitation had to do with buying sub-marginal land. To retire it from cultivation, reforest it and convert it into a state park. Much of the land we were authorized to buy was in the Great Plains area, damaged by dust storms. Tugwell’s idea was: These people should be moved to better land, not just kicked off bad land.

  This is what Rex and I were most interested in. There were about six million farmers in the country. I think we helped over a sixth of the farm families. A million farms. The most exciting part was the resettlement projects.

  Tugwell had a passion for the adjustment of people to the land. But being a good economist, he foresaw what was gonna happen to small farmers, who just couldn’t meet the competition. So we set up a certain number of co-op farms, about a hundred of ’em around the country. About twenty thousand families. Everett Dirksen later described it as Russian collectivism. (Laughs.) We were trying to work out cooperatives, where farmers would have their houses grouped, as a matter of convenience. We varied the pattern from place to place—nursery schools for their kids, central markets for their products…. Maybe it was Utopian, but I don’t think so.

  I’ll just tell you about one of ’em. We bought this beautiful delta land in Arkansas for about $100 an acre. It’s worth about $700 now. We set up this little community of five or six thousand acres. We brought in about fifty young families.106 A carefully selected group of young families….

  We built these houses, put in a school, nursery … they had individual garden plots. It was diversified land—livestock, cotton, fruits, vegetables. They were paid so much a month, and at the end of the year, when the crops were in, they’d divide the profits. It had been operating about two years. They were doin’ pretty well….

  Will Alexander spent several days on the project visiting with these families. He’d talk to them in the evening, when they were relaxed. They’d say, “Dr. Alexander, this is wonderful. You know, if we’re able to stay here four, five years, we’ll be able to go out on our own farm.”

  It came to us as sort of a shock. See, this hunger for land ownership … Although they were happy and more secure than they’d ever been in their lives, they were lookin’ forward to gettin’ out and ownin’ their own land. You have to reckon with this kind of thing.

  These projects were all stopped cold, after the death of Roosevelt, all liquidated. Congress saw to it. It’s one of the really sad things. They had all sorts of problems, sure—but this certainly would have been an important answer to poverty, as we see it now. Over half the farm families have disappeared. They are contributing to the ghetto problems of the city, black and white.

  Almost everything we did became controversial. Hopkins had built a couple of migratory labor camps in California. They were also transferred to us. They were very simple camps—well, Grapes of Wrath tells you about them better than I could.

  “I got a call from John Steinbeck. He wanted some help. He was planning to write this book on migrant workers. Will Alexander and I were delighted. He said, ‘I’m writing about people and I have to live as they live.’ He planned to go to work for seven, eight weeks as a pea picker or whatever. He asked us to assign someone to go along with him, a migrant worker. We chose a little guy named Collins, out of Virginia.

  “I paid Collins’ salary, which was perhaps illegal. He and Steinbeck worked in the fields together for seven or eight weeks. Steinbeck did a very nice thing. He insisted Collins be technical director of the film, this little migrant worker. And he got screen credit… .”

  At these camps, the people ran their own affairs. We had our project manager there to help them.107 This became the most controversial thing we ever did. Before we’d build a camp, we’d hold a public hearing. There was a lot of opposition, particularly from groups like the Associated Farmers.

  I was on the stand during one of these hearings. A Congressman, Al Elliott of California, was cross-questioning me. I had all the information, photographs—the plight of migrant workers. He argued against the camp. The real reason the big farmers didn’t want them built is that they were places where the migrants might get together and organize. Think of this guy, Chavez, today—things have changed so little in thirty years, it makes you sick to think of it.

  When Elliott finished his slambang cross-examination, I said, “You haven’t convinced me not to build the camp. I’m issuing instructions for it to be started.” He stormed across the room. He was a heavyweight boxer, ab
out six-three, weighing about 210. I weighed in at 155. (Laughs.) He hollered, “You don’t represent the people of my district! I represent them!” I said, “I have a national constituency. And a very important part of that are the migrant workers of this big country. I’m telling you again, Congressman Elliott, I’m gonna build this camp.” We built it. (Laughs.)

  Oh, the battles we had! There were any number of people in Congress who made a career out of it. Senator Byrd of Virginia—my own Senator —he was really out to destroy us.108 He introduced legislation to abolish the agency.

  The Farm Bureau, representing the big farmers, sent a very inexperienced kid into the South to investigate what we were doing. He came back with all sorts of fantastic charges. All of which had been published. I had to answer. I was called on the carpet by Byrd’s committee.

  There was one thing I had authorized that almost tripped me up. I advised our field workers and county supervisors to include in the rehabilitation loans enough to pay the poll taxes of individuals who couldn’t vote.109 Byrd thought he had me on this one.

  He said: “You are using federal money to pay the poll taxes of people in the South, is that true?” I said, “No, it isn’t true.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “We make loans to people. Small farmers who can’t get credit elsewhere. We make these loans for a variety of reasons. Number one, to buy their seed. Number two, to assure them enough to eat till their crop comes in. Number three, to buy the necessary equipment. Then we have to make sufficient allowance so the kids can at least have decent clothes. And—I have told our supervisors—if these people can register and vote, we should include in the loan enough to pay their poll tax … so, Senator, they can become citizens of the United States.”

  Carter Glass, the senior Senator from my state, said I was violating the Virginia Constitution: nobody could pay anybody else’s poll tax. I said: “We’re not paying them; we’re just lending them money as part of a complete operation.”